First for me

If you are a regular reader of my blog then you will already know that me, my WH (wonderful husband) & little Sis are going to be going to New Zealand together on a skiing/campervaning holiday. And today the news broke that Christchurch was hit by another earthquake (they got hit last September as well), unlike the last earthquake where no one lost their lives & there really wasn't any major damage, many lives have already been confirmed dead & buildings have completely collapsed.

I have never been in a position where a place that we are planning on going on a holiday in having something like this happen. We are planning on spending the last night of our holiday in Christchurch (where the earthquake hit). The pictures that are coming through are just frightening & I will admit to tearing up watching people stagger around outside crumpled buildings.

My heart & prayers are going out to the people of New Zealand & specially Christchurch. I pray that those that are missing are found safe & sound, and that there aren't anymore after shocks.

All good things......

It is that time again, the end of holidays. My WH (wonderful husband) has been on holidays from work for the past two weeks & tomorrow is his last day before he goes back to work on Tuesday. Yes I am sad.....I have really enjoyed the time that we have been able to spend together.

Things havn't worked out as we had planned, with the floods that our state has experienced. But hopefully in the next week we will be able to reshedule our tickets to go & see Wicked the musical.

I don't really mind that this did really work out, we still had a great time & did some great things together. Particularly going to help with the clean up in Brisbane, felt so good to know that we were really helping people.

This week we are going down to Brisbane again, this time for a compleltly different reason. On Australia Day (Woohoo, public holiday) we have tickets (along with a few people from our church) to see the 'Indescrble Tour' with Louie Giglio & Chris Tomlin. If you havn't heard about 'Indescrible' google it, get yourself a copy & watch it is breathe taking & life changing. I am so looking forward to going, it is going to be a great event! Even better for going with people you know & love.

Life is going to go back to 'normal' with my WH going back to work, it has been a wonderful holiday to me as well. My WH has been doing all the cooking, cleaning & laundry which has been absolutly wonderful for me. And makes things extra sad that it is coming to an end. LOL!!!

Oh, well I will make the most of tomorrow.

Count Down Begins!

We are off to New Zealand!!!!! This weekend me, my WH (wonderful husband) & my sister started planning our holiday to New Zealand that we will be taking in the middle of this year. This trip has been in the works for a couple of years now, since we came back from our trip to Cairns in 2009. At that stage I was working part-time & we thought that we could save up enough money pretty easy & go to New Zealand in 2010. We of course didn't know how our circumstances would change, and that I would lose my job & we would become a one income family.

Despite a reduction in income we decided that we still wanted to go, so pushed the holiday back a further year to give us twice as much saving time. And here we are......beginning of 2011 and officially planning & booking our holiday. So exciting!!!

Neither myself or my WH has been overseas, so we are also going through the process of getting our passports. We got the paperwork on Friday, had our photos taken on Saturday (they were awful photos!!!! But aren't all passport photos? Something about not smiling) & our wonderful Pastor signed our photos & paperwork as guarantor today. Worked out that I have known our Pastor for about 9years, wow!

We nutted out a rough plan with our Travel agent on Saturday, he was great loads of suggestions and ideas. We are using a travel agents that we used to book our Cairns holiday (though different branch), we weren't happy at all. When we arrived in Cairns we had nothing booked, airport transfers, rooms, tours...nothing. Thankfully I had our paperwork that proved that we had in fact paid for everything so the lovely people at the place we were staying booked everything for us. People told us they were surprised that things went so wrong, and that they had never had a problem with this travel agent but had used a different branch (the one that we are using to book this holiday). So far a vastly different experience (yeah!).

So our basic plan is the fly in Dunedin, drive to Queenstown, ski, then day trip to Milford Sound, back to Queenstown get a campervan (yep we are campervaning!) go to Fox Glacier, up to Greymouth, then into Hanmer Spring & into Christchurch which we will fly out of. That is the very basic plan, probably add a few more stops as we have alot of flexibility with having a campervan.

Now none of us have ever skied before, never even seen snow! So we are also shopping around for what we are going to need for the skiing portion of our trip. We are going to do a combination burrow, hire & buy. Our travel agent suggested investing in a jacket (one with a removable liner), and I have a friend who does a bit of snowboarding that I can burrow gear off, and we will hire what we can't burrow or justify buying just incase we don't like skiing.

It is funny, now that things have gotten rolling my mind has been turning to my travel journal. For our last couple of major trips I have kept a travel journal & also done a whole album about our holiday. This trip I will definatly be doing another travel album, not sure about another separate album (maybe digital!?) but we will see. Can't wait to share what I have descided upon travel journal wise.

Can't wait for this trip!!!!